ctail is like running tail -f, but can be used on multiple files. It uses the Curses library to split the screen into as many windows as there are files to watch. The size of each file's window can optionally be specified on the command line. Regular expressions can be used to display only lines matching (or not matching) arbitrary criteria.
Each file's window has a status bar, showing the file name, date and time of last change and current file size.

2007

MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of 2 or even more logfiles is possible. It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles (through regular expressions), for faster recognition of what is important and what not. It can also filter lines (again with regular expressions). It has interactive menus for editing given regular expressions and deleting and adding windows. One can also have windows with the output of shell scripts and other software. When viewing the output of external software, MultiTail can mimic the functionality of tools like 'watch' and such.

ctail is a tool for operating tail(1) across large clusters of machines, with many log files. It relies upon existing SSH authentication infrastructure, rather than introducing central points of log collection, or other large infrastructure changes, which aren't easily changed in many systems.

I'm Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine. I wrote The Long Tail, which first appeared in Wired in October 2004 and will become a book, published by Hyperion, in early 2006.
The Long Tail is about how the mass market is turning into a million niches. The term refers to the yellow part of the sales chart at left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to services. The vertical axis is sales, the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the "hits", which have dominated our commercial decisions to date. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which I argue in the article will prove equally important in the future now that technology has provided efficient ways to give consumers access to them thanks to the "infnite shelf-space effect" of new distribution mechanisms that break thought the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar.